Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-04-16 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk arolfe golem jbarnold jhawk kchen nelhage rayhe tabbott tilia wdaher yoz | aseering Associate members: asedeno hartmans mitchb ocschwar Prospectives: danjared jwalden mathmike | spang Guests: Officer Reports: tabbott: We have three elections for the end of the meeting. tabbott: I decided to come to MIT for grad school, so SIPB is not rid of me yet. tabbott: How much money do we have? tilia: About $5500. The numbers aren’t great. tabbott: We should spend more money. mathmike: Tax-exempt forms? tilia: If you buy things for SIPB, we don’t have to pay taxes. There are tax-exempt forms in the treasurer’s drawer. jhawk: Said forms are also on the web at web/cao. If you are buying something, and you are paying tax and expecting to be reimbursed, you should make sure the treasurer knows beforehand. tabbott: Election meeting. jwalden: I’ve been a Firefox developer for a while. I was originally doing documentation and now doing more interesting things. I’ve taught two IAP classes on writing Firefox extensions. I hang around the office and answer user questions. danjared: I’ve been around on and off for three years. I help with SIPB’s IPv6 service, steve-dallas (our VMware virtualization service), SIPB tours last summer. mathmike: I’m a senior, going to be MEnging next year. Most of the organization of the SIPB library is my fault; inventory of the office. I’m responsible for course.mit.edu. tabbott: Questions? arolfe: Each of you should ask the person to your left whatever question it was you dreaded most. tabbott: We have a toroidal office. mathmike: jwalden, ask a question of the office that only you know the answer to. jwalden: Can the value of an HTTP header include a null byte, and under what circumstances? jhawk: Can’t you just URL-encode it? jwalden: No, I mean a literal null byte. jwalden: So as it turns out, you can have null bytes and I believe most control characters in header values with the restriction that it has to be in a quoted string. I don’t have any idea why they did this. danjared: mathmike, who was tabbott before tabbott was tabbott (going all the way back)? mathmike: I can’t go farther back than jbarnold. jbarnold: It’s actually really easy now. tabbott’s backpointer is jbarnold, and jbarnold’s backpointer is jbarnold [draws loop on the whiteboard]. jwalden: danjared, what should SIPB do to ease the process of getting new members? danjared: It would help us to have more projects that people are working on where they encourage prospectives and people they know to work on them. I feel like there are a lot of old projects that SIPB has that are closed off, and it would be nice to have new people. For example, AFS cell maintainers. jhawk: danjared, tell us more about IPv6 and why we might want to use it. If you feel like it, a replacement for the number 0x45. danjared: Am I supposed to know the significance of the number 0x45? jhawk: It’s the first byte of an IPv4 packet. danjared: It has a lot of features besides a larger address space. For example autoconfiguration is a lot easier. I’m still learning about it myself, there are dozens of RFCs to read. jwalden: What is autoconfiguration in the context of IPv6? danjared: You don’t need DHCP for example, which helps ad-hoc networks. arolfe: Someone comes into the office and says “my favorite service is broken” but you don’t know who to tell. jwalden: There’s a document on the wall, and in the locker, who_fixes_what. If it’s something SIPBish, find who maintains it and send them an email. mitchb: Tell them to find a new favorite service. danjared: Mention it on -c sipb. It might be something localized; maybe it’s the person’s computer, maybe it’s different for different people. jhawk: Emacs vs. vi. jwalden: nano. nelhage: SUCKS! jwalden: vi has this problem where you can’t figure out anything. My favorite vi command is :q—it’s the only one I know. Emacs is better since it has a GUI, but I don’t see why I should need to learn the Emacs GUI. mathmike: Emacs. At least when you use the menu commands it generally tells you how you could have done this otherwise. danjared: The features of vim are good; if vim is available I’ll use vim. I found vi easier to learn than Emacs. tabbott: SIPB has heroically spent half of the money we need to spend. I want to hear one purchace that SIPB should make some time soon. jwalden: I might be wrong, but I believe the version of Visual C++ on deathtongue is 6. The Firefox trunk requires 8 or 2005 or whatever Microsoft is calling it. jhawk: Does Firefox not build with open-source tools on Windows? jwalden: Nothing officially supported. Some people are working on it. There’s also the issue of ABI compatibility. danjared: What would be sort of nice is a UPS for the rack in the office. mathmike: I think the best purchase we’ve made recently are these new monitors with all this space. rayhe: We can leave a lot of our stuff in the office because it’s supposed to be a safe place. As SIPB members you’ll be given a key and allowed to be in the office alone. Will you (a) not steal deberg’s laptop and (b) through inaction allow it to be stolen? jwalden: I would not steal the laptop and would not through inaction allow it to be stolen. jhawk: On a scale of 1–10, please rate the quality of the questions you’ve been asked. jwalden: I’ll put it at a 6. The point is to figure out what their contribution to SIPB would be if they were members. mathmike: By the time nominations get to this point, people have probably made up their mind. The point now is just to have fun. danjared: I was expecting more amusing questions. I haven’t been asked my user ID, which is suprising. It seems like a way to have fun and a rite of passage. wdaher: If I press this in and lock these drawers, how do you unlock them? danjared: Find a hacker. mathmike: Ask wdaher to unlock the drawer for me. wdaher: I think the key to these is in the place with the cameras and stuff. jhawk: a.k.a. the key drawer. mitchb: danjared, what’s your primary key number in moira? It’s an oracle database, your row has a number. If you wanted to know it, how would you figure it out? danjared: Ask zacheiss. mitchb: You can also have someone with account bits grep for your number in the mb locker. nelhage: How many office heads can you name? jwalden: yaz-pistachio jwalden: portnoy danjared: mega-man mathmike: cutter-john jwalden: bobbi-harlow danjared: quiche-loraine jwalden: deathtongue jwalden: bart-savagewood danjared: oliver mathmike: opus jwalden: pickled-herring danjared: general-dink jwalden: zygorthian-space-raiders danjared: milquetoast yoz: Do you know what milque toast is? danjared: Bloom county? yoz: Milque toast is a cockroach. wdaher: If you had to be a product in the SIPB Cokecomm offerings, which one? jwalden: Cream soda; as for why, delicate taste. danjared: Gatorade because it’s refreshing. mathmike: Sprite because it’s caffeine free and I usually get to sleep, though not at the right times. mitchb: It’s the evening of the Stratton house photo. jhawk is unable to make it. Who or what do you take from the office to be jhawk in the picture? jwalden: I would have to take the “Don’t panic” poster. danjared: portnoy. mitchb: Last time I remember this happening, I think they brought Pikachu. jbarnold: SIPB already has a wide selection of Jeffs. Why does SIPB need another Jeff? jwalden: You can never have enough Jeffs. tabbott: Name a hack scheduled by the 1993 hacking series committee. mathmike: Stealing the cannon. jwalden: Ski-jump off the Green Building. arolfe: What’s the one thing that SIPB does that’s most impressive to your mother or grandmother? danjared: Staplers! mathmike: We play around with computers and do cool stuff with them. jwalden: I have no idea what my mom would ever care about relating to SIPB. arolfe: How about a somewhat technologically literate friend? mathmike: scripts. jwalden: linerva. If I weren’t at Random Hall and didn’t have ozok, it would definitely be linerva. danjared: Staplers. andersk: Does your computer support UTF-8? danjared: Yes. jwalden: I do indeed support UTF-8 and the computers I run support it as well. mathmike: There are many programs on my computer and not all of them support UTF-8. arolfe: I think Omri should ask The Question. ocschwar: Why y’all wanna be SIPB members? jwalden: Not being kicked out of the office. Nice to have an Athena account. danjared: It would be nice to be able to come to the student center and work here, not be disappointed that the office is closed. mathmike: I can’t say it would be nice to not be kicked out of the office because that hasn’t happened to me, but when I am the only person in the office it would be nice to be able to go to the bathroom. jwalden: If I am membered, I promise to be here for the chair to be repaired. <16-0-0, jwalden membered> <16-0-0, danjared membered> <16-0-0, mathmike membered> MIT Computing Report: tabbott: keithw reported that the mail system does domain name canonicalization stuff. jhawk: The mail system is following an old RFC. hartmans: Why do we care? jhawk: It broke email to some site. jhawk: On Friday, po12 experienced 3–4 hour delays, apparently because a single individual was receiving a lot of email. mathmike: MIT was having external connectivity problems, apparently due to a corrupted forwarding table on a router. kchen: The second time, they were investigating a traffic spike on the NOX link. SIPB Projects Report: wdaher: Keith and I played with the new RFID box for a few hours. It draws too much current and Linux stopped being happy with it. kchen: I ordered some Ubuntu Feisty CDs. If they approve the request they will arrive in 6–10 weeks. andersk: How many did you order? kchen: I ordered 25 PC, 3 64-bit, but said that if they wanted to give us more we’d take them. tabbott: jweiss sent email about some really old backups that we don’t want anymore. We can get them destroyed by DOST for $1 each. Move to allocate $50 to destroy some old tapes. jhawk: White ballot for $75? jbarnold: Why does it cost $1 to destroy a tape? golem: I would charge more than $1. hartmans: It’s totally worth $75. Office Report: tabbott: We have a 24ʺ display on cutter-john, and a new debathena office head which does not yet have debathena on it. tabbott: rayhe mounted a projector screen over the glass whiteboard. mitchb: Our Aeron chair claims to have shipped earlier today. tabbott: There’s still some food leftover from the CPW event that people should feel free to ransack. tabbott: There’s been some investigation done on the warranty repair for the chairs. wdaher: Someone came in and asked to use our paper cutter. I was really excited. tilia: Some other person came in and asked to use the paper cutter, and then said “what a life saver!” jhawk: I was crawling under the table and found a really small brown brain. tabbott: Whose brain is it? jhawk: Adam Seering. Education Report: tabbott: We had a CPW event on Friday night here—the Inode and fsck Block Party. Around 10 prefrosh showed up. The “name that vulnerability” game was popular; we had printouts of patches to the Linux kernel, and discussed them with the prefrosh. tabbott: We should probably do a larger-scale version of the Inode and fsck Block Party in the fall. jbarnold: Have we recorded the email addresses they gave us? tabbott: No. Why don’t you do that? jbarnold: [moving] Because it’s in the center of the table and I’m over here. Other: hartmans: On paper at least today, I lost more money than I’ve ever made in a year. This is from the lingering dot-com report. hartmans: It’s okay, I get a nice big tax writeoff. aseering: I just set up an Ubuntu mirror on my computer and I’m considering seeing if this could be done as a SIPB service. jhawk: I don’t think SIPB is in a good position to run externally facing mirrors. Bandwidth is not immensely plentiful. mathmike: Someone was talking about us getting more bandwidth for the building. jhawk: IS&T had planned to upgrade the building to gigabit. Some parts have been upgraded, but there’s reason to believe they’re behind schedule. golem: There is a Debian mirror at CSAIL. nelhage: They’re not interested in running an Ubuntu mirror. danjared: The CSAIL admin I talked to said that he felt that Canonical did not need more support. nelhage: I believe they just don’t like Ubuntu and Canonical. jwalden: Taxes have to be postmarked tomorrow. Other Other: yoz: If you’re planning to graduate in June, you should pick up your regalia this week. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 20:25. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.